Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker (left) and ex-governor Andrew Cuomo (proper) collectively in 2008.
Getty Photographs
Jeff Zucker is out at CNN — for failing to reveal a (consensual) relationship with a subordinate. Which implies his crimes towards journalism and the community’s viewers will get swept beneath the rug.
Above all, his equally consensual however far much less skilled relations with now-disgraced however then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
It was a seething nest of conflicts of curiosity that additionally included the gov’s brother, CNN star Chris Cuomo, and Zucker’s paramour, prime CNN exec Allison Gollust — additionally a former communications director for Andrew.
The item of their collusion: To make Cuomo right into a state and nationwide savior determine . . . earlier than the governor bought taken down by his personal alleged sexual misdeeds.
Zucker helped lead the general public laundering of Cuomo’s disastrous COVID insurance policies, which noticed the pandemic rip by New York because the governor piled restriction on ineffective restriction, closed colleges and shoved aged individuals with COVID into nursing properties (afterward hiding numbers on the deaths that resulted).
By way of Chris Cuomo’s now-infamous softball interviews (performed with assistance from a large Q-Tip), Zucker helped wash Andrew’s status clear sufficient to make him a hashtagged intercourse object,putative future presidential contenderand multimillion-dollar book-advance earner.
Journalism 101: Softball interviews along with your brother isn’t journalism; at greatest, it’s leisure; at worst, a kind of political pornography.
Add within the allegations that Zucker was himself teaching the then-gov on what to say in his each day COVID briefings (one other a part of what made Andrew a star).
One other degree of this scandal: Except for some delicate criticism of the Cuo Bro interviews on the time, a lot of the remainder of the media, which ought to have been calling for Zucker’s head from the beginning . . . didn’t.
So right here we're. Zucker did nothing mistaken, his ouster says, by violating the general public belief nonetheless positioned (we don’t know why) in CNN. He did nothing mistaken by cozying as much as the highly effective and establishing a revolving door between authorities and media.
He did nothing mistaken by breaking each rule of journalistic ethics and permitting a governor to be interviewed by his personal brother, with no challenges to the horrible insurance policies he had put in place.
He did nothing mistaken in making an epochal disaster for New York that a lot worse.
No. What he did mistaken was partaking in authorized bed room antics.
And this deranged narrative about Zucker seems prefer it’s going to win.
Allow us to say it clearly. Jeff Zucker’s actual crime is aiding and abetting Andrew Cuomo as he blundered his method by the depths of the pandemic and harmed innumerable New Yorkers in so doing.
Post a Comment